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Saturday, 23 January 2016

As I’ve previously blogged about, I’m involved in the Athena
SWAN process. I’m co-leading the process at my School and I’ve now been a
panellist assessing departmental Athena SWAN submissions. Both activities are a
lot of hard work (and not quite fully acknowledged in workload allocations) but
excellent, interesting and rewarding. It has made me consider my own practices
as an academic in a different light and also made me quite angry at a lot of
the unquestioned practices and behaviours in academic practice.

I’ve begun to talk about academic practice and practices a
lot. It started from my work on the AHRC Connected Communities project Connecting Epistemologies
where I worked with an artist for the summer who would discuss their arts
practice. I understand academic practices to be things like: lecturing,
supervision, facilitating group discussion, marking, various writing practices,
resource coordination and management etc.

One thing I like about thinking through academic work as
practices in this way is it helps me focus on what it is in a particular
context that means that a practice is carried out in a certain way, and whether
that is a question of individual agency, or a wider structural issue. For
example, when I think through academic practices (such as the list above) I’m
always amazed at how many you can be trained to do better, but how rarely that
training is systematically offered to academics. Take lecturing (I now disownthis blog post to an extent): it takes certain skills to talk persuasively
through a topic for a set period of time and engage an audience. There are some
pretty basic skills here: breathing techniques; ensuring your voice is
well-supported by your diaphragm; using modulation and pauses to keep the
audience engaged. An actor would expect this as part of this training. If we
are lecturing to large classes, we should be given this training (luckily I did
get it, from the Edinburgh Beltane).

Athena SWAN focuses me on the wider structural issues. For
example, producing papers for academic journals is one of the key academic
practices. In the social sciences, single-authored pieces are seen to be more
likely to be highly-ranked in the Research Excellence Framework. There is subsequently,
among some bits of social science, to push early-career researchers to get
individual fellowships, to build up this REF-worthy track record. This
particularly negatively impacts on women: they are more likely to take career
breaks at this stage of their career for maternity leave and caring, so group
projects might make more sense; across many fellowship schemes they are also
less likely to be awarded the fellowships.

Another example comes from my role as an editor and
peer-review. An academic practice is citation, we are expected to cite the
latest literature in support of an argument we are making. This is a shared cultural practice. Yet, it is often
quite striking that due to global structural barriers, many scholars in the
majority world simply cannot access these resources.

Athena SWAN is interesting because it puts a lot of these
practices to work to a positive end – challenging gender divides within
academia and encouraging women’s progression. Specifically it uses the skills
that academics and associated professionals have in making complex judgement
based on set criteria, and also peer review. These were the skills I used when
I assessed applications and that were used in the Athena SWAN panel I was a member
of.

These academic practices take place in contexts with
specific incentive structures. I’ve already mentioned the REF and this is
probably one of the key incentive structures: it shapes the ways universities
are organised and their strategic priorities; it affects the way academics
adjust their communication practices to deliver “impact” – more prosaically, to
get their research findings understood and used by a wider audience. They mean
our writing practices are focused at the four 4* papers. Like Athena SWAN, the
REF uses academic practices, particularly peer review.

Athena SWAN has also benefited from similar incentive
mechanisms. Recognising the widespread problems that women faced in STEM
subjects, the research councils adjusted their criteria to be more favourable
to departments that had Athena SWAN awards – the award stopped being something
that a few forward-thinking departments had, to something all departments
worked positively towards.

I’m a bit of an evangelist for Athena SWAN – I know it’s not
perfect, but it’s certainly better than nothing, and when it’s done properly
(as my main experience has been) it does lead to dramatic change. But thinking
about it in terms of how I’ve laid out this post before, I could not have
ruminate as I was assessing applications: what if Athena SWAN became part of
the criteria that were assessed in the REF? I imagine we’d see a lot of change
fairly quickly. I imagine the Equality Challenge Unit would be fairly busy in
the run-up to 2020 as well. Of course, we’d no doubt end-up with the
double-bind that I think Athena SWAN accidentally creates – in trying to do
good, it just adds another task to academic’s overflowing to-do lists and puts
women under pressure. To anyone pulling together an Athena SWAN application,
note that the criteria state that workload models should give a time allocation
to being a member of the Self-Assessment Team!

When I mentioned this idea to one of the staff at the ECU
they mentioned that HEFCE had done some work, that remains unpublished, that
demonstrated that departments with greater collegiality and gender diversity
achieved better in research metrics. They added that it would be interesting,
also, to see how Athena SWAN also related to this.

There’s a widespread view in academic that metrics and audit
are bad things. But from a perspective of policy analysis, and also from my
experience governing an organisation, I can also see the positive sides of
these regimes: audit is design to make issues transparent and make people
accountable. In the case of Athena SWAN it makes institutions accountable for
the processes and behaviours that systematically stop women advancing in their
academic careers and reaching their potential.

So, to come to some sort of conclusion, the raging
resistance to regimes of audit is, I think, sometimes misguided. These
processes have the effects (and affects) they do because they are powerful
tools. But that means they can be used powerfully to positive ends. This might
make me a sell-out to global Neil Librulism. I think it makes me someone who
wants to deliver positive change for the marginalised and disadvantaged in society
now.

Tuesday, 19 January 2016

I was teaching policy analysis this afternoon and developed a wee activity on "framing" of policy issues. I'll repeat it here - it's just a series of statements about a mythical "something". A smug feeling of satisfaction to the first person who can guess what it is:

It killed 3,409 people in 2000 and this fell to 1,713 in the UK in 2014

In 2014 it injured 192,000 people in UK, 22,807 of them seriously

In 2012-13 there was a 12% increase in the number of the most vulnerable people in the UK killed by this.

WHO estimates it kills approximately 1.24 million people worldwide a year.

Not doing this and doing something else can add 3-7 years to your life expectancy.

Not doing this and doing something else can add six months to your life expectancy.

The election of a Conservative majority government in the UK in May 2015, with their manifesto commitment to cut the ‘welfare bill’ by £12 billion, has meant that the public debate within the UK on the costs of the social insurance system has remained high profile. In this tour de force, Professor John Hills provides a forensic account of social policy and socio-economic inequality in the UK, trying to provide evidence to inform what is often a ‘post evidence’ political debate (see, for example: Macdonald et al., 2014: on ‘hunting the yeti’ of the policy trope of households with three generations of unemployment).The book is based on exhaustive analysis of administrative and survey data-sets across the UK. As a structuring device, the book returns to a television programme shown on ITV in the UK in 1989—Beat the Taxman. In this original programme, Hills’ colleague Julian Le Grand showed how through taxation and benefits from universal services an affluent family—the Osbornes—actually did far better from UK government expenditure than the worse off Ackroyd family.The device of comparing the two families, now with grandchildren, is used throughout the book, and particularly in pen portraits that start each chapter, to compare the income and assets of the households involved, the proportion of household income each family pays in tax and what benefits in cash and services each household receives. At its core, the book returns to a key insight about the role of the welfare state stated in the original Beveridge report, that its role is more about redistributing resources over an individuals’ life course than redistributing resources between individuals (Figures 3.1–3.3, pp. 50–51). One of the interesting early points also made is that compared to other welfare systems around the world, the UK state does the most ‘work’ in redistributing income; we might have a very economically unequal society, but it is even more unequal before the state has done its work redistributing.The book will hold particular interest for housing scholars in its consideration of the way the housing market, taxation and the benefits system interact in the UK. While this is not a central focus of the book, it includes important new analysis that will be of interest. For example, Chapter 6 ‘The long wave’ focuses on retirement and wealth. With many older people now being home owners outright, and supported by good pensions, the intergenerational divide between ‘baby boomers’ and younger people is another common trope of current social policy public discourse. Through his analysis of wealth in the UK, Professor Hills clearly demonstrates that it is inequalities within generations between the extremely wealthy and those with few assets or debts that are of greatest concern at all age ranges. These inequities are far greater than those between generations. Furthermore, policy in the UK clearly supports and exacerbates these inequalities: wealth is very lightly taxed, with home ownership barely taxed at all. For those receiving out-of-work benefits, levels of marginal taxation are actually a disincentive for lower income households to save.Professor Hills also uses extensive new analysis on the UK benefits system, including the work of his colleagues at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the LSE, to highlight the weaknesses around the housing benefits system in the UK. Using analysis of longitudinal data in Chapter 4, he demonstrates the normality of ‘high frequency’ living in the contemporary UK—that is, for most households, income varies dramatically across the year as members move into and out of insecure work. The benefits system, and particularly housing benefits and tax credits, serve to exaggerate rather than (as might be expected) smooth these swings in household income.This is an excellent and competitively priced book that will be of interest to a wide audience and is accessible enough to be a core text on undergraduate reading lists. A possible weakness of the book relates directly to its intellectual strength: its core messages and use of a wealth of data are intellectual hard work. Though it no doubt acts as an intellectual bulwark against anti-welfare policy arguments, one does wonder if it will succeed in more widely challenging the ‘myths’ around welfare that it intends to.As critical analysis suggests (Jensen & Tyler, 2015) current tropes and myths of policy discourse—three generations unemployed, benefits broods, households receiving over £100,000 a year in benefits—are enormously powerful in shaping policy and political discourse. These emotive images cannot easily be countered through analysis that shows that they are non-existent, or are extreme and explicable cases. Similarly, individual examples of the hardships caused by welfare reform are very emotive—such as the widely shared story of a man who had to bathe in an inflatable children’s paddling pool in his new living room after being evicted from his adapted home due to rent arrears caused by the ‘Bedroom Tax’ (see The Liverpool Echo 22 August 2015). But ultimately, these stories appear unable to change UK public attitudes in favour of cutting welfare benefits to the poorest in society, as shown in Chapter 9. As a reader, I cannot offer any answers regarding what would more effectively counter such public attitudes, but unfortunately, I doubt this book will be the solution.Jensen, T. & Tyler, I. (2015) “Benefits broods”: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense, Critical Social Policy. Macdonald, R., Shildrick, T., & Furlong, A. (2014) In search of ‘intergenerational cultures of worklessness’: Hunting the Yeti and shooting zombies, Critical Social Policy, 34(2), pp. 199–220.

Monday, 11 January 2016

I did my doctoral research on area-based initiatives, or
ABIs. Even when I was doing the research the writing was on the wall for them –
the focus of my research had been the former Scottish Executive Community
Regeneration Fund administered through Single Outcome Agreements. This ceased
to be just as I was going into the field following the first SNP victory in
2007, so it ended up being about the “ending” of meaningful
regeneration for residents. Following the 2010 election and the coalition
government it looked like any form of
regeneration was off the cards under the excuse of “austerity”. I’ve co-edited
a book – After Regeneration­ – that
argues this very point. My research had turned to broader questions of inequality
in our cities, particularly what the increasing focus on community engagement
and involvement in service delivery might mean for inequalities
in service delivery.

And then David Cameron goes and announces a new ABI
on the Andrew Marr show. Thanks. I’m
back in business; or am I? First of all, as many have pointed out, the amount
of funding for this ABI is pitifully small. It’s the same as the former
Community Regeneration Fund in Scotland spent in one year – and that was in
2006 when the money was worth more and in a country ten times smaller. But it
looks like it’s just enough money to prompt a private-sector to “regenerate”
some of the neighbourhoods concerned; to remove the risk of having to get rid
of pesky tenants or asbestos. This is the continuation of the processes
happening in numerous estates in London that do not deserve the title of “regeneration”.
It is state-funded removal of low-income households from our cities.

Secondly – as any human geographer, economic geographer,
planner or policy analyst worth their salt will point out, ABIs don’t work; or
at least they’re very bad at doing what David Cameron thinks they are good at.
In terms of the causes of neighbourhood deprivation, I can’t bang
on about
this enough.
Saying deprived neighbourhoods cause deprivation is like calling a bucket you
have filled with apples an apple tree. Deprived neighbourhoods exist because,
either, we put all our social housing in one place (something Scotland is particularly
good at doing and is repeating), or wider macro-economic forces mean that a
neighbourhood is a risky investment proposition so property values and rents
fall, so it becomes somewhere where households with a low income end up living.
There is some evidence in some circumstances that “neighbourhood
effects” exist – that is, living with lots of other people in poverty decreases
your chances of escaping poverty. But that evidence is very scant, and as Tom
Slater highlights,
it is macro-economic processes, still, that cause the concentrations of
deprivation in the first place.

So, ABIs don’t work because they misidentify the policy
problem – they look to solve a problem in neighbourhoods that isn’t there. They
also don’t work because, well we just know they don’t work. As this blog from
the RSA
highlights, the biggest ABI ever, the New
Deal for Communities, achieved some change in some indicators, and some of
this was caused by broader processes of gentrification in London. As a lot of
evaluations of ABIs have shown, and was picked up in my own research, ABIs are
very good at changing physical things in neighbourhoods – building new housing,
refurbishing housing, building new schools, doctors surgeries, libraries etc.
But these rarely cause long term change in the outcomes for the residents. That
occurs through enhancing services in the neighbourhoods – more resources for
schools; public health interventions; employability projects – and the gains
from these often leak out of the neighbourhood and cease pretty shortly after
the ABI has ended.

But, as has been recognised from the 1990s, politicians like
ABIs because it makes it looks like they’re doing something about something.
Also, communities often like ABIs and the physical renewal they produce because
it makes them feel like something is being done about something. And, much as I
criticise ABIs, I do agree
with the broader premise of them that if
you invest in deprived neighbourhoods they will get better. The trouble
with ABIs is the “boot-strap” approach – that this is a one-time fix. It is
not, and the investment needs to continue in perpetuity. I would welcome a
return to a proper regeneration policy as England had until the Treasury
Sub-National Review: prioritised neighbourhood spending delivered through
local authorities, nested within city-wide economic policies, nested within regional
policies that sought to encourage economic development and rebalance growth. If
you slapped a layer of national planning on top of that it would have been
grand. You also probably would’ve been called a Communist.

Cameron’s regeneration policy is not this. As a piece coming
out in the journal I’m on the editorial team of, Local Government Studies, highlights, the ending of the Revenue
Support Grant for local authorities in England is leading us in into terrifying
and uncharted territory. Local authorities, or the wider city region authorities
being created, will be entirely responsible for raising their own revenue, no
matter how flimsy their tax base is. As Michael Lord Heseltine laughably suggested
on BBC Radio 4’s PM last October when this was announced, the idea is that if a
local authority like Sunderland wants the tax base of Westminster, then it just
has to drop its taxes to attract in new business and households. If only urban
policy was as simple as it is in Sim City.

Under the guise of localism, this government is locking the
UK into a framework of the spatial distribution of economic growth last seen
for a brief period in the UK between 1848 and 1870 – when the Corn Laws stopped
artificially supporting the agricultural economy of the south and before
central government grants to local government started. When central government expenditure
does have a spatial impact it is the inverse of what might be considered
progressive: the cuts to welfare benefits, as analysed by CRESR
which massively effect the north of England, Scotland and Wales; the
infrastructure expenditure as analysed by CRESC
which massively benefits the south of England and London; the billions cut
from the budgets of the most deprived local authorities, as analysed
by research funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. By 2020, I’d be
interested to know if there was any country that did less fiscal work spatially
redistributing the benefits of economic development than the UK.

So, David Cameron has launched an ABI. To say he’s launched
a regeneration policy is an insult to the thousands of people who have created
and implemented regeneration policies since 1968. Given the pitiful sums
involved, I doubt we can even call it state-led gentrification. But in broader
policy changes this government is creating a tidal wave that will lead to the
UK being a massively spatially unequal country. Deprived neighbourhoods will be
like baby turtles being tossed around on the massive outflows of capital from
towns and regions. This expenditure will distract a shark from eating them for
a few seconds; it definitely isn’t a life line.

* I’d give the title a number, but there’s been so many ABIs
over the years I couldn’t possibly count them.

I live in a slowly gentrifying neighbourhood of Edinburgh,
Scotland – of the sort that typifies many of the case studies in this book (Doucet 2009). The main road to the city
centre from the neighbourhood is currently being upgraded and there was a local
campaign to get it redesigned in what this book, and readers based in North
America, would call “complete streets” style – wide pavements, segregated cycle
lanes and vastly reduced space for vehicular traffic, with speeds reduced to
20mph. The battle was lost, and non-segregated, advisory cycle lanes were
installed which are now predominantly used a car-parking places for businesses
on the road. Meanwhile, in the more affluent south of the city, an extensive
segregated network of cycle paths is emerging. In the suburban south-west of
the city, a non-affluent community I work with extensively have poor quality
public realm and a streetscape designed in the 1960s which is hostile to
pedestrians and cyclists.

This collection of essays edited by Stephen Zavestoski and
Julian Agyeman illuminates these issues of equity and road infrastructure
design in fascinating detail. The book focuses on the “complete streets”
movement (living streets in the UK; standard road design in the Netherlands and
Denmark) highlighting through various critical approaches that in societies
with high levels of socio-economic inequality ‘when implemented incrementally,
Complete Streets will inevitably benefit certain people in certain urban spaces
and not others’ (p.7). The book is broken into three sections: processes,
practices and possibilities.

The processes section essentially takes us through stories
to tell us “where are we now?”, starting off with Peter Norton’s beguiling
chapter on the role of the motor industry PR in the US in forming motor-vehicle
oriented road design standards, a theme developed further by Aaron Golub. The
chapters by Chronopolous and Lee then critically engage with the intersection
of sustainability policies – such as complete streets design and congestion
charging – and various policies that could be labelled “neoliberal”.
Chronopolous, in particular highlights how congestion charging is a regressive
tax. The section ends with Mehta using an evocative description of street life
in India to describe what a complete street might be like if it was truly
inclusive.

The sections on practices and possibilities were less
clearly delineated in terms of content. They were mainly case-studies of
various cities in the US and how they have implemented various Complete Streets
policies, or related policies such as pavement/sidewalk food vending, or
community stewardship schemes. Particular highlights in these last two sections
were Langegger’s account of the racially-driven removal of Hispanic “lowriders”
from the streets of Denver; and Vallianatos' account of the illegal street
vendors making the sidewalks of Los Angeles their space.

However, in their introduction Zavestoski and Agyeman
rhetorically suggest that ‘this volume initiates the kind of dialogue and
future research that can help answer these questions’ – and the trouble, as they
allude to in their conclusion, is that many of the chapters signally do not
answer questions. Over many of the chapters the bogeyman of gentrification
looms large – essentially (and the evidence presented in the volume is
compelling in this regard) complete streets as an urban design practice in the
USA goes hand-in-hand with gentrification and the displacement of poor People
of Color by richer white hipsters on fixed-gear bikes.

I find this troubling, because it leaves the planner with a
Hobson’s choice – design safe streets and create a tidal wave of
gentrification; or leave things as a status-quo. As a researcher interested in
delivering socially just urban renewal I find this troubling – do less affluent
communities have to stay in neighbourhoods with poor quality public-realm that
endangers their safety and their health just in case improving them leads to
some displacement? Obviously, the answer is no; we can do things such as ensure
levels of affordable rented housing remain high; but that the logic of their
argument ends at this point does not seem to have been fully grappled by many
of the authors.

The chapters that get nearest to this are Cadji and Hope
Alkon in their chapter on North Oakland farmers market and Goodling and
Herrington writing about the Portland Community Watershed Program. Both these
chapters offer fascinating accounts of community organisers and workers
wrestling with the challenges of trying to deliver environmental equity without
exacerbating socio-economic injustice through their work. A frustratingly short
chapter was that by Chapple – this highlights that in the US context Complete
Streets policies are regressive because most lower-skilled, lower-paid workers
have to drive to their suburban work locations. This is an argument and issue
that could have been explored in much greater depth throughout the book.

A major weakness of the book was its parochial focus on the
USA and this weakened the argument overall. An engagement with practice from
northern European countries, particularly Denmark and the Netherlands could
have offered real opportunities to learn how to deliver environmentally
sustainable street design without exacerbating socio-economic injustices.
Parallels could also have been made with UK practice which seems to be
following the US trend.

This notwithstanding, I would recommend this book be read by
anyone involved in urban design, transport planning and cycling advocacy – it
raises thorny issues and questions that stick with you a long time. I wish
traffic engineers would read it to realise their engineering solutions have
social impacts. As a cycling advocate myself, it has made me rethink what my
priorities are for the city in which I live as it expands its provision for
active travel.

Doucet, B. (2009).
"Living through gentrification: subjective experiences of local,
non-gentrifying residents in Leith, Edinburgh." Journal of Housing and
the Built Environment24(3):
299-315.

About Me

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling.
I blog about urban policy, cycling and other ephemera in a semi-professional manner. All posts represent personal opinions.